Minister of Information Kojo Oppong Nkrumah has stated government does not subscribe to the certification of journalists before they can practise in the media space.
According to him, what the administration expects is for stakeholders in the industry to identify the capacity gaps, design a curriculum to close those gaps and let the broader society help participants with this training.
That, he said, is what the government is doing with the media capacity enhancement programme.
The Information Minister said these during question time in Parliament on Thursday in response to a follow-up question by the Member of Parliament for Bawku Central Mahama Ayariga.
Mr. Oppong Nkrumah was answering a question that stood in the name of the member for Old Tafo, Vincent Ekow Assafuah who asked what efforts the Ministry is putting in place to promote decorum and sanity on the media airwaves.
The Bawku Central MP questioned whether the Minister is considering ensuring media houses employ certified journalists to host programmes in view of the fact that practitioners of other professions go through accredited programmes and get certified to participate in the industry.
The Minister, however, noted the practice of journalism falls under the umbrella of freedom of expression and therefore difficult to even seek to legislate that if a person is not certified he cannot practice journalism.
“Mr. Speaker, journalism has also grown today to the extent where we have citizen journalists so will the advocacy for journalists to be certified also extend to citizen journalists,” he quizzed?
These, he said, are the considerations for which it will be very difficult to seek to legislate the practices of journalism.
He noted that as journalism grows various people can practice it even when they have not been formally trained as journalists.
“I practised journalism for close to a decade. I never went to school as a journalist but what worked for me and what has worked for many other people who never even studied journalism is rather the on-the-job training and the opportunity to have training and support while you are on the job,” he said.
According to him, what is being done at the policy level is to get all the industry stakeholders together to ask how training can be initiated and help mobilize support.
“It is this that we are operating with through the media capacity enhancement programme. We do not subscribe to certification of journalists,” he said.
The job of the Ministry of Information, he said, has been to provide policy leadership and try to mobilize funding to support training programmes that are designed and implemented by the independent working group of stakeholders in the industry.
